This is a cool paper. Various devices, including modems, routers, disk drives and printers leak the data they are transmitting through their LEDs. This is much easier then "Tempest." The hardware required to recover this information costs like $10.

Data Leaking from LEDS

A Net-controlled robot reporter from MIT may be headed for Afghanistan.

Salon.com Technology | Do androids dream of First Amendment rights?

Researchers report on their success in applying two "hyper" topologies to improve the scalability of Gnutella. This brief paper seems to be getting a lot of press.

Doesn't this seem like a "duh" to you? These topologies aren't new. I recall discussing the virtual hypertorus with Tom in ~1996 in regard to the "pipenet" idea. They are quite common in the literature of high-performance cluster computing.

In an ad-hoc P2P network, I suspect it will be problematic to discover the network topology and then force users to interconnect themselves in this way. Even so, this paper is useful in that it demonstrates (theoretically) viable alternatives to the untrustworthy Morpheus/KaZaA-style "supernode"-based architectures.

Hypernets -- Good (G)news for Gnutella

If you want to be in the right place at the right time you need to figure out where things are going...

BT's future timeline

""We're trying to make human DJs obsolete as far as possible," he chuckles. "They're expensive, they're unreliable. If we can make this machine work we'll give club owners an easy time." "

BBC News | BOSTON 2002 | The rockin' robot

Over 200 implementations of SNMP impacted by DoS and Buffer Overflow exploits.

CERT Advisory CA-2002-03 Multiple Vulnerabilities in Many Implementations of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)

"Robots are being let loose in a colony of machines in an attempt to find out whether they can learn from their experiences.
The scientists behind this unusual experiment describe it as an evolutionary arms race for robots, with the machines struggling to collect energy. "

Life starts to resemble a Rudy Rucker novel.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Robot wars for real

Link and excerpt from Ditherati:

Freedom of the Press Belongs to the Guy With The T-3 Connection

"Sure I want to be the biggest telecom company in the world, but it's just a commodity. I want to be able to form opinion. By controlling the pipe, you can eventually get control of the content."

    -- IDT chairman Howard Jonas, on his plan to be Rupert Murdoch without the subtlety

For IDT, the Big Flameouts Light Its Fire

Meanwhile, the creators of Trillian plan to keep up the tit-for-tat efforts. Since AOL first started blocking the software Tuesday, they have released one workaround and at least two more full downloads of Trillian. "

AOL blocks instant messaging start-up - Tech News - CNET.com

"An effort in the Senate to revive that plan and include it in the anti-terrorism bill that was signed into law October 26 received little support and was withdrawn, and on much the same grounds%u2014that however powerful an intelligence tool code breaking was during its golden age, in World War II and the Cold War, the technical reality is that those days are gone. Code breaking simply cannot work the magic it once did. "

The Atlantic | February 2002 | Losing the Code War | Budiansky